Report Finds More Young People Leaving Upstate NY

A report from the fiscally conservative Empire Center this morning reiterated much of what upstate officials, business groups and academics have said for years: the area is getting grayer.

Adults between the ages of 20 and 34 have dropped sharply in upstate New York and the downstate suburbs.

New York City, meanwhile, has become a “magnet” for the young, drawing 300,000 new residents in that age range during the 2000s.

It’s no secret that jobs aren’t exactly plentiful in upstate New York, which has seen an exodus of manufacturing companies over a generation.

The outlook, the report says, isn’t good. Upstate needs to hang on to its “bumper crop” of college graduates by somehow boosting their post-degree job prospects.

Higher education enrollment is expected to drop by the end of the decade. And while the economy has begun to recover from the recession, the 1.3 percent average annual rate in private sector job growth upstate over the past two years has been less than half the rate of growth during the 1990s—which wasn’t enough to prevent an exodus of young adults during that decade.